by Chloe Gong
“That’s a mighty strong lighter you have there,” Marshall remarked.
Lourens quashed the flame. He strode toward the worktable then, with a pace that Roma didn’t think him capable of, and hovered the petri dish over the rest of the dozens of insects that remained on the wooden surface.
“It is not the lighter’s doing, dear boy.”
He pushed down on the lighter. This time, as the insect under the flame turned fiery red and curled inward, so too did all the insects laid out on the table—viciously, suddenly, in a manner that almost gave Roma a fright in believing they had come alive.
Benedikt took a step back. Marshall pressed his hand to his mouth.
“How can that be?” Roma demanded. “How is this possible?”
“Distance is the determinant here,” Lourens said. “Even in death, one insect’s action is determined by the others nearby. It is possible that they do not have their own mind. It is possible they act as one—every single one of these insects that remain alive.”
“What does this mean?” Roma pressed. “Are they responsible for the dead men?”
“Perhaps, but it is hard to say.” Lourens set the petri dish down, then rubbed at his eyes. He seemed to hesitate, which was terribly unexpected and, for whatever reason, prompted a pit to begin growing in Roma’s stomach. In the years that Roma had known the old scientist, Lourens was always saying whatever came to mind with no concern for propriety.
“Spit it out,” Benedikt prodded.
A great, great sigh. “These are not organic creatures,” Lourens said. “Whatever these things are, God did not make them.”
And when Lourens crossed himself, Roma finally realized the unearthliness of what they were dealing with.
Five
Midday sunlight streamed through Juliette’s bedroom window. Despite the shine, it was brisk out today, chilly in the sort of way that drew the roses in the garden a little straighter, as if they couldn’t afford to lose a single second of the warmth filtering through the clouds.
“Can you believe Tyler?” Juliette fumed, pacing her room. “Who does he think he is? Has he been bullying his way around for the past four years?”
Rosalind and Kathleen both pulled a face from upon Juliette’s bed, where Rosalind was braiding Kathleen’s hair. That look was as good as confirmation.
“You know Tyler doesn’t have any real influence in this gang,” Kathleen tried. “Don’t worry—ow, Rosalind!”
“Stop moving and maybe I wouldn’t have to pull so hard,” Rosalind replied evenly. “Do you want two even braids or two lopsided braids?”
Kathleen folded her arms, huffing. Whatever point she had been raising to Juliette seemed completely forgotten. “Just wait until I learn how to braid my own hair. Then you’ll have power over me no longer.”
“You’ve been growing your hair long for five years, mèimei. Just admit you think my braiding is superior.”
A smattering of sound came from right outside Juliette’s bedroom door then. Juliette frowned, listening while Kathleen and Rosalind continued on, with no indication they had heard the same noise.
“Of course your braiding is superior. While you were learning how to style yourself and be ladylike, I was being taught how to swing a golf club and shake hands aggressively.”
“I know the tutors were bigoted assholes about your education. I’m only saying right now to stop squirming—”
“Hey, hey, hush,” Juliette whispered quickly, pressing a finger to her lips. It had been footsteps. Footsteps that stopped, probably in hopes of catching a floating piece of gossip.
While most mansions of big-name bosses sat along Bubbling Well Road in the city center, the Cai house resided quietly at the very edge of Shanghai; it was an effort to avoid the watchful eyes of the foreigners governing the city, yet despite its strange location, it was the hotspot of the Scarlet Gang. Anybody who was anybody in the network would come knocking when they had free time, even though the Cais owned countless smaller residences in the heart of the city.
In the silence, the footsteps sounded again, moving on. It probably mattered little if the maids and aunts and uncles passing by every minute tried to eavesdrop—Juliette, Rosalind, and Kathleen were always speaking in rapid English when it was only the three of them, and very few people in the house had the linguistic ability to act as eavesdroppers. Still, it was irritating.
“I think they’re gone,” Kathleen said after a while. “Anyway, before Rosalind distracted me”—she shot her sister a feigned dirty look for emphasis—“my point was that Tyler is merely a nuisance. Let him say what he wants to say. The Scarlet Gang is strong enough to deflect him.”
Juliette sighed heavily. “But I worry.” She wandered to her balcony doors. When she pressed her fingers to the glass, the heat of her skin misted up the surface immediately in little dots: five identical spots where she left her mark. “We don’t take note of it, but the blood feud casualties keep rising. Now, with this strange madness, how long will it be before we don’t have the numbers to be operating anymore?”
“That won’t happen,” Rosalind reassured her, finishing the braids. “Shanghai is under our fist—”
“Shanghai was under our fist,” her sister cut in. Kathleen sniffed, and pointed to a map of the city that Juliette had unfurled on her desk. “Now the French control the French Concession. The British, the Americans, and the Japanese have the International Settlement. And we’re battling the White Flowers for a stable grasp on everywhere else, which is a feat in itself considering how few Chinese-owned zones are left—”
“Oh, stop.” Rosalind groaned, pretending to have a fainting spell. Juliette had to stifle a giggle as Rosalind splayed an arm across her forehead and flopped back onto the bed. “You’ve been listening to too much Communist propaganda.”
Kathleen frowned. “I have not.”
“At least admit you have Communist sympathies, come on.”
“They’re not wrong,” Kathleen retorted. “This city is no longer Chinese.”
“Who cares.” Rosalind kicked out with her foot suddenly, using the momentum to push her body upright, sitting so fast that her coiffed hair whipped into her eyes. “Every armed force in this city either has an allegiance to the Scarlet Gang or the White Flowers. That is where the power is. No matter how much land we lose to the foreigners, gangsters are the most powerful force in this city, not foreign white men.”
“Until the foreign white men start rolling in their own artilleries,” Juliette muttered. She walked away from the balcony doors and trailed back toward her vanity table, hovering by the long seat. Almost absently, she reached out, trailing her finger along the lip of the ceramic vase that sat by her cosmetics. There used to be a blue-and-white Chinese vase here, but red roses did not match the whorls of porcelain, and so the swap had been made for a Western design instead.
It would have been so much easier if the Scarlets had run the foreigners out, had chased them away with bullets and threats the moment their ships and their fancy goods docked in the Bund. Even now the gangsters could still join forces with the tired factory workers and their boycotts. Together, if only the Scarlet Gang wanted to, they could overrun the foreigners… but they wouldn’t. The Scarlet Gang was profiting far too much. They needed this investment, this economy, these stacks and stacks of money flooding into their ranks and holding them afloat.
It pained Juliette to think about. On her first day back, she had paused outside the Public Garden, spotted a sign that read NO CHINESE ALLOWED, and burst out laughing. Who in their right mind would forbid the Chinese from entering a space in their own country? Only later did she realize it hadn’t been a joke. The foreigners truly thought themselves mighty enough to enforce spaces that were reserved for the Foreign Community, reasoning that the foreign funds they poured into their newly constructed parks and newly opened speakeasies justified their takeover.
For temporary riches, the Chinese were letting the foreigners make permanent marks
upon their land, and the foreigners were growing cozy. Juliette feared the tables would turn suddenly one day, leaving the Scarlet Gang to realize they had found themselves standing on the outside.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Juliette jerked to attention, using the vanity mirror to peer at Rosalind. “What?”
“You looked like you were plotting murder.”
A knock came on Juliette’s bedroom door before she could respond, forcing her to turn around properly. Ali, one of the maids, opened the door and shuffled through, but remained hovering over the threshold, unwilling to step too far in. None of the household staff knew how to deal with Juliette. She was too bold, too brazen, too Western, while they were too new, too uncertain, never comfortable. The household staff rotated every month as a matter of practicality. It prevented the Cais from learning their stories, their lives, their histories. In no time, their month was up and they were being shoved out the door for their own safety, cutting the ties that would bind Lord and Lady Cai to more and more people.
“Xiǎojiě, there’s a visitor downstairs,” Ali said softly.
It hadn’t always been like this. Once, they had had a set of household staff that lasted through Juliette’s first fifteen years of life. Once, Juliette had Nurse, and Nurse would tuck Juliette in and tell her the most heart-aching tales of desert lands and lush forests.
Juliette reached out, plucked a red rose from the vase. The moment she closed her hands around the stem, the thorns pricked her palm, but she hardly felt the sting past the calluses protecting her skin, past the years she had spent chasing away every part of her that qualified for delicate.
Juliette hadn’t understood at first. Four years ago, while she knelt in the gardens, trimming their rosebushes with thick gloves on, she hadn’t realized why the temperature around her had risen so intently, why it sounded almost as if the entire grounds of the Cai mansion were shuddering with… an explosion.
Her ears were screeching—first with the remnants of that awful, loud sound, then with the shouting, the panic, the cries wafting over from the back, where the servants’ house was. When she hurried over, she saw rubble. She saw a leg. A pool of blood. Someone had been standing right at the threshold of the front door when the ceiling caved in. Someone in a dress that looked like the sort Nurse wore, with the same fabric that Juliette had always tugged on as a child, because it was all she could reach to get Nurse’s attention.
There had been a single white flower lying on the path into the servants’ house. When Juliette shook off her gloves and picked it up, her ears ringing and her whole mind dazed, her fingers came upon a pinned note, one written in Russian, in cursive, bleeding with ink when she unfolded it.
My son sends his regards.
They had wheeled so many bodies into the hospital that day. Corpses upon corpses. The Cais had been playing nice, had decided to ease up on an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time—and look where it had gotten them: death delivered directly to their doorstep. From that incident onward, the Scarlet Gang and White Flowers shot at each other on sight, guarding and defending territory lines as if their honor and reputation depended on it.
“Xiǎojiě?”
Juliette squeezed her eyes shut, dropping the rose and smoothing a cold hand over her face until she could swallow back every memory that threatened to erupt. When she opened her eyes again, her gaze was dull, uninterested as she inspected her fingernails.
“So?” she said. “I don’t deal with the visitors. Get my parents.”
Ali cleared her throat, then twisted her hands through the rough hem of her button shirt. “Your parents are out. I could fetch Cai Tailei—”
“No,” Juliette snapped. She regretted her tone immediately when the maid’s expression turned stricken. Out of all their household staff, Ali was the one who treated Juliette with the least amount of caution. She didn’t deserve to be barked at.
Juliette tried for a smile. “Let Tyler be. It’s probably just Walter Dexter downstairs. I’ll go.”
Ali inclined her chin respectfully, then hurried away before Juliette’s temper came back. Juliette supposed she gave the household staff the wrong impression. She would do anything for the Scarlet Gang. She cared for their welfare and their politics, their coalitions and alliances with the merchant firms and investors.
But she did not care about little men like Walter Dexter, who thought themselves mightily important without the capacity to back such a claim. She had no desire to be running the errands that her father didn’t want to do. This was far from the cutthroat business she had expected to be welcomed into when she was finally summoned back. If she had known that Lord Cai would leave her out of the blood feud, out of the same paralleled sniping occurring on the political stage, maybe she wouldn’t have rushed to pack her bags and pour out the entire contents of her alcohol stash when she left New York behind.
After the attack that killed Nurse, Juliette had been shipped back to New York for her own safety, had had to simmer on her resentment for four long years. It wasn’t who she was. She would have rather stayed and braced herself on her own two feet, fight with her chin held up. Juliette Cai had been taught not to run, but her parents—as parents tended to be—were hypocrites, and they had forced her to run, forced her out of the thick of the blood feud, forced her to become someone far removed from the danger.
And now she was back.
Rosalind made a throaty noise as Juliette shrugged a jacket over her beaded dress. “There it is again.”
“What?”
“The murder face,” Kathleen supplied without looking up from her magazine.
Juliette rolled her eyes. “I think this is simply my resting expression.”
“No, your resting expression is this.” Rosalind imitated the most scatterbrained expression she could manage, eyes wide and mouth open, swaying in circles on the bed. In response, Juliette threw a slipper at her, drawing giggles from Kathleen.
“Shoo,” Rosalind chided, smacking the slipper away and biting down on her laugh. “Go attend to your duties.”
Juliette was already walking out, making a rude gesture over her shoulder. As she trudged down the hallway of the second floor, picking at her chipping nails, she paused in front of her father’s office to shake out her shoe, which hadn’t fit right ever since it had gotten caught on a drain covering.
Then she froze, her hand on her ankle. She could hear voices coming from the office.
“Ah, excuse me,” Juliette hollered, kicking the door open with her high-heeled shoe. “The maid said you were both out.”
Her parents lifted their heads at once, blinking plainly. Her mother was standing over her father’s shoulder, one hand rested on the desk and the other placed upon a document in front of them.
“The staff say what we want them to say, qīn’ài de,” Lady Cai said. She made a flicking motion with her fingers at Juliette. “Don’t you have a visitor to entertain downstairs?”
Huffing, Juliette pulled the door closed again, glaring daggers at her parents. They hardly paid her heed. They simply went back to their conversation, assuming Juliette would run along.
“We have lost two men to it already, and if the whispers are true, more will fall before we can determine exactly what is causing it,” her mother said, voice low as she resumed speaking. Lady Cai always sounded different in Shanghainese than any other language or dialect. It was hard to verbalize exactly what it was except a feeling of calm, even if the subject matter carried a terrible squall of emotion. That was what it meant to speak your native tongue, Juliette supposed.
Juliette wasn’t really sure what her native tongue was.
“The Communists are beside themselves with joy. Zhang Gutai won’t even need a megaphone for recruitment anymore.” Her father was the opposite. He was quick and sharp. Though the tones of Shanghainese came completely from the mouth instead of the tongue or throat, he somehow managed to make it reverberate tenfold within himself first before re
leasing the sound. “With people dropping like flies, capitalist ventures cease to grow, factories become ripe for revolution. Shanghai’s commercial development comes to an abrupt stop.”
Juliette grimaced, then hurried away from her father’s office door. No matter how hard her father had tried through his letters, Juliette had never cared much about who was who in the government, not unless their ongoings had some direct effect on Scarlet business. All she cared about was the Scarlet Gang, about whatever immediate dangers and tribulations they were facing on a day-to-day basis. Which meant that in scheming, Juliette’s mind liked to gravitate to the White Flowers, not to the Communists. But if the Communists had indeed unleashed madness onto this city as her father seemed to suspect, then they, too, were killing her people, and she had a bone to pick with them. Her father hadn’t been overlooking the deaths in favor of politics this morning after all. Perhaps they were one and the same.
It does make sense that the Communists could be responsible for the madness, Juliette thought as she started down the staircase toward the first floor.
Only how could they possibly manage such a feat? Civil war was no novelty. This country was in political turmoil more than it was at peace. But something that caused innocent people to gouge their own throats out was certainly far from any biological warfare Juliette had studied.
Juliette bounded onto the last step of the staircase.
“Hello!” she shouted. “I am here! You may bow!” She entered the living room and, with a start, found a stranger primly seated on one of the couches. It was not the annoying British merchant, but it was indeed someone who looked very similar, only younger, around her age.
“I’ll refrain from bowing if that’s okay,” the stranger said, an upward tilt to his mouth. He rose to his feet and stuck out his hand. “I’m Paul. Paul Dexter. My father couldn’t make it today, so he sent me.”
Juliette ignored the outstretched hand. Poor etiquette, she noted immediately. By the rules of British society, a lady was always to have the privilege of offering the handshake. Not that she cared about British etiquette, nor how their high society defined what a lady was, but such minuscule details pointed to a lack of training, and so Juliette filed that away in her head.